The present invention relates to the field of digital signal processing, and in particular to the field to adaptive digital filters for beamforming transducer arrays.
Many applications (e.g., radar, sonar, satellite communications, background noise reducing hearing aids, etc.) often include a directionally sensitive antenna-array or microphone array (generically a beamforming tranducer array). These beamforming transducer arrays and their associated signal processing are capable of enhancing a desired target source relative to another non-target source (e.g., a jammer/noise source). The enhancements improve the perceived target-to-jammer power ratio (TJR), which, in turn, improves the performance of subsequent, target-based processing.
One application of a beamforming transducer array is for hearing aids. Hearing aid wearers often complain about the corrupting influence of background noise upon their ability to understand a desired target source. Enhancing the target relative to the background noise reduces this problem. Similarly, applications such as satellite communications, radar and sonar also benefit from the directional filtering ability of beamforming transducer arrays. We shall now discuss the basic beamforming problem.